Friday miscellany: Back, Bach, Brahms, sleep, etc.

The good news is I’ve been able to sleep a little later in the morning for the latter half of this week. Both my older boys are off at a state technology competition, so after getting them out the door on Wednesday, both Thursday and Friday I’ve just needed to get my 12-year-old daughter on the bus. Today in particular I moved very slowly as I bring my little two boys to school on Friday. At 8:10 a.m. neither had left their rooms!

But the sleep…ugh. The little dude would not go down on Wednesday night. He was up until 11:15 p.m. This was after I’d woken up around 5 a.m. that morning and kept thinking of various things that needed to be done. So as my 4-year-old was bouncing around between 10 and 11 p.m. when I just desperately wanted to go to bed, I was fairly miserable. At one point I was lying on the floor of his room, but then I got suddenly cold (as I sometimes do when I lie still for a while) and was shivering, so I ran to my bed to get under the covers with a heating pad to stop the shivers, and of course that meant he was yelling for me while I was there, and eventually he was running around my room…not my finest moment. I’d also put my back in a bad state by hauling down the trash cans to the end of the driveway…not usually my job but see above about my two older boys not being home. Anyway, I kept telling myself that this could not last forever and eventually I would get to sleep, and I did. But…not nearly as early as I hoped.

Speaking of back woes…I went to a follow-up visit with a new pain/back/physical medicine doctor this week (the one I saw in January following my original incident has left his practice so this was a colleague). As I have gone through two months of physical therapy and still have pain, she suggested an MRI (I guess you have to do physical therapy first for insurance to approve it…) So that’s on the calendar for May.

In music news, longtime readers know that this year I’m listening to all the works of Bach. Next week (April 24th, to be exact) will be the last solo organ piece. I’ve been listening to 1-3 of them per day since January 1st (along with a cantata a day — I’m up to listening to BWV 112 today). Bach wrote a lot of organ music: BWVs 525-771. Progress! I believe I’m on track to finish everything by the end of December at this pace.

I’m also singing a lot of Brahms. My church choir will be performing it (with Brahms’ arrangement for two pianos) on April 28th so we are nearing the end of rehearsals. Last night was another intense one — the soprano parts on the fugues are somewhat exhausting. But it is bringing me back to learning it my senior year of college, also in spring, I believe. That was a long time ago.

Anyway, a few links for the week. Over at Vanderhacks, I wrote about how to “Remember the tulips” and that “‘Not as much as I want’ is not the same as ‘none.‘” The paywalled post is about “9 ways to level up your content.” If you’d like to get a productivity tip delivered to your inbox every weekday morning, please consider either a free or paid subscription.

The Before Breakfast podcast covered the truth that “None feels different from one,” and asked “What’s the tax on your time?” All projects require some sort of administrative overhead, so by limiting how many projects you have going at once, you can limit the proportion of your time spent on this “tax.”

This weekend I might go see more flowers. I need to help my 16-year-old apply for a parking spot at school for next year. I hope to clean out my closet…and maybe listen to some Taylor Swift. How about you?